After a successful online edition in 2020, this year the international space hackathon ActInSpace® is back in more than 60 cities around the world, including Turin, Italy. The event will be hosted on November 18th and 19th, 2022 by I3P, the Innovative Companies Incubator of Politecnico di Torino, in collaboration with the global organizers: the French Space Agency (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA). Operational execution will be supervised by ESA BIC Sud France, led by Aerospace Valley.
ActInSpace is a global innovation contest uniting space enthusiasts across 5 continents. Designed for students but open to everyone, ActInSpace aims to cultivate new entrepreneurial initiatives: participating teams will have 24 hours to imagine and design innovative services and products derived from space technologies and data. Local juries of experts and professionals from the space industry will then select the best projects, which will be awarded in local competitions and brought to compete in the international finals, which will take place in France in February, 2023.
The local event in Turin - the only Italian host city for this edition of ActInSpace - will be held in presence at the I3P headquarters within the Campus of Politecnico di Torino. The event will welcome all participants at its venue on Friday, November 18th, from 2:00 to 2:30 PM CET. After introduction and team composition, the hackathon will start at 4:00 PM and participants will have 24 hours to work in groups on their projects, with assistance and useful advice from local mentors. During the event, the “space hackers” will also have the chance to get in touch with ESA BIC Turin, the incubation program managed by I3P with the scientific and technological support of Politecnico di Torino and LINKS Foundation, who offers funding opportunities and a wide range of business and technical services to boost the development of space start-ups.
In fact, ActInSpace is a marathon of creativity and innovation created to foster entrepreneurship in the space sector, especially among young people, where participants from a diverse range of backgrounds and with expertise in a variety of fields collaborate in small teams to take up one of more than 20 challenges set up by CNES, ESA and their international partners. The challenges are divided in four main categories: “Be a new space player”, “Business in everyday life”, “Space for Earth and humanity” and one new theme for 2022 “Fly to the moon and beyond”. Notably, ActInSpace proposes challenges based on either CNES or ESA patents, or on data supplied by event partners such as Pléiades, Copernicus, EGNOS, Galileo. The initiative aims to consolidate the vibrant image of the space sector, and to show how space technologies are supporting applications that reach into all areas of our daily lives.
The final part of the hackathon will take place on the afternoon of Saturday 19th. The teams will pitch their projects to the local jury to win one of the local prizes offered by event sponsors. The best teams from each host city will then access the worldwide finals, and compete for several global prizes - for instance, a parabolic flight aboard a Zero-G Airbus A310.
Participation in ActInSpace is free of cost and open to all those who would like to try their hand at an innovative space-related project: students, developers, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, logistics experts, marketers and communicators can all register to take part in the hackathon. Registrations to Turin’s local event are already underway, with limited places available: application forms must be filled out on the official ActInSpace international website: https://actinspace.org/register.
“We are honoured to have the opportunity to collaborate with CNES, ESA and Aerospace Valley for the latest edition of ActInSpace, a Europe-born hackathon now spread all over the world. We’re especially proud to host this special event since it is aimed at fostering entrepreneurship in the space sector, a mission which is fully shared by the ESA BIC Turin incubation program”, said Giuseppe Scellato, President of I3P and Coordinator of ESA BIC Turin. “Mentors and consultants from our Incubator are more than ready to meet the teams and to assist them in shaping their innovative projects using current space technology and space-acquired data to develop what could become the core idea for a new successful start-up.”
